I think that removing the link to the sitemap shouldn’t be a big problem for the navigation, but I wonder what happens with the disclaimer and the contact page? If nofollow doesn’t sink the linked page, how can we tell the search engine that these are not content pages. For some websites these are some of the most linked pages. And yes for some the contact page is worth gaining rank, but for my website is not.
For example, what are the quality and quantity of the links that have been created over time? Are they natural and organic links stemming from relevant and high quality content, or are they spammy links, unnatural links or coming from bad link neighborhoods? Are all the links coming from the same few websites over time or is there a healthy amount of global IP diversification in the links?
Just like the new structure on JavaScript links and them now carrying weight and being crawlable, the PageRank sculpting change is understandable. Google now can and wants to index more of the web (JavaScript link change). Google wants to reverse a method that can only help people in the know (PageRank sculpting change). Logically, all is very understandable.

Assume a small universe of four web pages: A, B, C and D. Links from a page to itself are ignored. Multiple outbound links from one page to another page are treated as a single link. PageRank is initialized to the same value for all pages. In the original form of PageRank, the sum of PageRank over all pages was the total number of pages on the web at that time, so each page in this example would have an initial value of 1. However, later versions of PageRank, and the remainder of this section, assume a probability distribution between 0 and 1. Hence the initial value for each page in this example is 0.25.

We have to remember that Google’s $ model+bots to scour the web have to tow the same line so they can optimize their own pocketbook, balancing a free and open resource – ie. the www, all while taking money from the natural competition that arises from their market share. On the one side, its all about appearing fair and the other, to drive competitive output.
I still think you’re going to cause a new form of sculpting, where people will remove links from their pages other than using nofollow, in hopes flowing PageRank to links they think are important. You’ve said number of links matter — and that nofollow doesn’t reduce those links — so some will keep chasing after whatever extra oomph may be out there.
This is what happens to the numbers after 15 iterations…. Look at how the 5 nodes are all stabilizing to the same numbers. If we had started with all pages being 1, by the way, which is what most people tell you to do, this would have taken many more iterations to get to a stable set of numbers (and in fact – in this model – would not have stabilized at all) Links still matter as part of the algorithmic secret sauce. The influence of a site’s link profile is plain to see in its search engine rankings, whether for better or worse, and changes in that link profile cause noticeable movement up or down the SERP. An SEO’s emphasis today should be on attracting links to quality content naturally, not building them en masse. (For more on proper link building today, see http://bit.ly/1XIm3vf )
However, if you are seasoned online marketer, and you've built a substantial following, then marketing as an affiliate might be the right fit. Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor has built a seven-figure business with affiliate marketing, while David Sharpe from Legendary Marketer has built up an eight-figure business by creating an army of affiliates that market products in collaboration with his team.
So, for example, a short-tail keyphrase might be “Logo design”. Putting that into Google will get you an awful lot of hits. There’s a lot of competition for that phrase, and it’s not particularly useful for your business, either. There are no buying signals in the phrase – so many people will use this phrase to learn about logo design or to examine other aspects of logo design work.

But this leads to a question — if my husband wants to do a roundup of every Wagner Ring Cycle on DVD, that’s about 8 Amazon links on the page, all bleeding PR away from his substantive insights. If he, instead, wants to do a roundup of every Ring Cycle on CD, that’s about two dozen items worth discussing. The page would be very handy for users, and would involve considerably more effort on his part… but no good deed goes unpunished, and in the eyes of Google the page would be devalued by more than two thirds.

It is interesting to read the article which however as others have commented leaves questions unanswered. The ideal internal page rank flow is clearly down the hierarchy and back up again evidently and no page to page links down the line. If this effect is big enough to have provoked an algorithm change then it must be substantial. Removing those related product links altogether would improve ranking and degrade the user experience of the site which surely is undesirable. I suspect the lesser of two evils was chosen.
Your customers, prospects, and partners are the lifeblood of of your business. You need to build your marketing strategy around them. Step 1 of marketing is understanding what your customers want, which can be challenging when you’re dealing with such a diverse audience. This chapter will walk you through (1) the process of building personal connections at scale and (2) crafting customer value propositions that funnel back to ROI for your company.
Our SEM team has been managing paid search since its inception and is driven solely by analytics and financial data. Our core focus is to expand our clients’ campaigns, drive quality traffic that will foster conversions and increase revenue, while decreasing the cost per acquisition. IMI’s PPC team members are recognized thought leaders, active bloggers and speakers and major tradeshows, and care deeply about each and every client. We manage our client’s budgets as if it was our own, tracking every dollar and optimizing towards very specific milestones and metrics.
After finding websites that have good metrics, you have to make sure the website is related to your site. For each competitor backlink, try to understand how your competitor got that link. If it was a guest article, send a request to become a contributor as well. If it was a product review by a blogger, contact the writer and offer them a good deal in exchange for a similar review.

My final (thank goodness) point on this is not that (white hat) PageRank sculpitng was really anything special. It was just quite logical. It really feels like we are going down a wrong route here. Shall we outlaw cars because some people drive dangerously? Or should we do all we can to make driving safer? Not on the same level in any way, but you can see my point here. This is the first time I have felt that you have made a bad call and that is the only reason I am making a case for the logics of this.

Google's strategy works well. By focusing on the links going to and from a Web page, the search engine can organize results in a useful way. While there are a few tricks webmasters can use to improve Google standings, the best way to get a top spot is to consistently provide top quality content, which gives other people the incentive to link back to their pages.

PageRank as a visible score has been dying a slow death since around 2010, I’d say. Pulling it from the Google Toolbar makes it official, puts the final nail in the visible PageRank score coffin. The few actually viewing it within Internet Explorer, itself a depreciated browser, aren’t many. The real impact in dropping it from the toolbar means that third parties can no longer find ways to pull those scores automatically.

It’s not a secret that Google appreciates business citations and listings. They are a part of its search algorithm. It’s a strong fact that must make you choose business links for your SEO campaign. The other benefit is that because of them you can receive unoptimized and DoFollow links. These links can guarantee trustworthy neighboring of your site that will attract Internet users and clients. Google considers these platforms as trustworthy and knows that they attract other business clients. In other words, almost all of them are accepted as 100% relevant.

Non-profit corporations and political entities use Internet marketing to raise awareness about the issues they address and engage individuals in their campaigns. They strongly favor social networking platforms because they are more personal than websites and they are easy to share, increasing the “viral” word-of-mouth effect that is so prevalent in online media.

For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.
Hemanth Kumar, a good rule of thumb is: if a link on your website is internal (that is, it points back to your website), let it flow PageRank–no need to use nofollow. If a link on your website points to a different website, much of the time it still makes sense for that link to flow PageRank. The time when I would use nofollow are when you can’t or don’t want to vouch for a site, e.g. if a link is added by an outside user that you don’t particularly trust. For example, if an unknown user leaves a link on your guestbook page, that would be a great time to use the nofollow attribute on that link.
But I also don’t wanna lose PageRank on every comment with a link… If I can give PageRank and lose none, I wanna let the comment there, even without nofollow. But if I lose PageRank on every link, even inside original post, EVEN MORE if nofollow also takes PageRank out of me, I may just start using JavaScript or simple text without anchor for links… I definetely don’t like this idea, but I dislike even more losing PageRank on each outlink on my site. I’d just link top quality sites that I actively wanna vote for Search Engines.
PageRank as a visible score has been dying a slow death since around 2010, I’d say. Pulling it from the Google Toolbar makes it official, puts the final nail in the visible PageRank score coffin. The few actually viewing it within Internet Explorer, itself a depreciated browser, aren’t many. The real impact in dropping it from the toolbar means that third parties can no longer find ways to pull those scores automatically.
A decent article which encourages discussion and healthy debate. Reading some of the comments I see it also highlights some of the misunderstandings some people (including some SEOs) have of Google PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is not the same thing as PageRank. The little green bar (Toolbar PageRank) was never a very accurate metric and told you very little about the value of any particular web page. It may have been officially killed off earlier this year, but the truth is its been dead for many years. Real PageRank on the other hand, is at the core of Google’s algorithm and remains very important.

btw; All those SEO’s out there probably made some monies off clients, selling the sculpting thang to them. I know some are still insisting it worked, etc, but would they say in public that it didn’t work after they already took a site’s money to sculpt? How would anyone judge if it worked or not definitively? The funny thing is, the real issues of that site could have been fixed for the long term instead of applying a band aide. Of course; knowing the state of this industry right now, band aides are the in thing anyway.

A Web crawler may use PageRank as one of a number of importance metrics it uses to determine which URL to visit during a crawl of the web. One of the early working papers[56] that were used in the creation of Google is Efficient crawling through URL ordering,[57] which discusses the use of a number of different importance metrics to determine how deeply, and how much of a site Google will crawl. PageRank is presented as one of a number of these importance metrics, though there are others listed such as the number of inbound and outbound links for a URL, and the distance from the root directory on a site to the URL. Me, I didn’t like the sculpting idea from the start. I linked to what I thought should get links and figured that was pretty natural, to have navigational links, external links and so on — and natural has long been the think Google’s rewarded the most. So I didn’t sculpt, even after Matt helped put it out there, because it just made no long term sense to me.
Our team is made up of industry-recognized thought leaders, social media masters, corporate communications experts, vertical marketing specialists, and internet marketing strategists. Members of the TheeTeam host SEO MeetUp groups and actively participate in Triangle area marketing organizations. TheeDigital is an active sponsor of the AMA Triangle Chapter.

This must be one of the most controversial attributes ever. I participate in photographic communities. The textual content there is quite sparse, as it is a visual medium, with only basic descriptions. However, the community is very active and the participants leave a lot of meaningful comments. Now, with the “nofollow” used everywhere the photographic community is punishing itself for being active and interactive without knowing it. WordPress and Pixelpost now have “nofollow” built in almost on any list of links (blog-roll, comments etc). The plug-in and theme developers for these platforms followed suit and yes, you’ve guessed it – added “nofollow” almost on every link. So, every time I leave a comment without being an anonymous coward or if some one likes my blog and links to it in their blog-roll than I’m or they are diluting the rank of my blog? Does it mean for my own good I should stop participating in the community? Should I visit hundreds of blogs I visited in last three years and ask the owners to remove my comments and remove my site from their blog-roll to stop my PageRank from free falling?

The field is replete with terms that might confuse and perplex the average individual. What is a squeeze page? What's a sales funnel? What's a CPA? What's SEO? How do you setup a good blog to filter the right type of relevant traffic and get your offer in front of eligible users? What's a massive value post (MVP) really mean? Clearly, there are an endless array of terms, some of which you might already know or might not depending on how much you presently know about the field.

A lot of the problem lies in the name “PageRank” itself. The term “PageRank” implies that a higher value automatically equates to better search engine ranking. It’s not necessarily the case, it hasn’t been the case for some time, but it sounds like it is. As stupid as it sounds, a semantic name change may solve a lot of this all by itself. Some of the old-school crowd will still interpret it as PageRank, but most of the new-school crowd will have a better understanding of what it actually is, why the present SEO crowd blows its importance way too far out of proportion and how silly the industry gets when something like this is posted.

After finding websites that have good metrics, you have to make sure the website is related to your site. For each competitor backlink, try to understand how your competitor got that link. If it was a guest article, send a request to become a contributor as well. If it was a product review by a blogger, contact the writer and offer them a good deal in exchange for a similar review.

Links still matter as part of the algorithmic secret sauce. The influence of a site’s link profile is plain to see in its search engine rankings, whether for better or worse, and changes in that link profile cause noticeable movement up or down the SERP. An SEO’s emphasis today should be on attracting links to quality content naturally, not building them en masse. (For more on proper link building today, see http://bit.ly/1XIm3vf ) It's clear that online marketing is no simple task. And the reason why we've landed in this world of "expert" internet marketers who are constantly cheerleading their offers to help us reach visibility and penetrate the masses is because of the layer of obscurity that's been afforded to us in part thanks to one key player: Google. Google's shrouded algorithms that cloud over 200+ ranking factors in a simple and easy-to-use interface has confounded businesses for well over a decade now.
There’s no avoiding it: internet marketing is critical for the success of your business in 2018. But with all the gimmicks and tricks, it can be difficult to distinguish short-term wins from effective long-term strategies, which is why we’ve created an ultimate guide. Here, we’ll cover everything from marketing strategies to real-world examples, to ensure your business reaches the right people out of that four billion.
I was exactly thinking the same thing what Danny Sullivan had said. If comments (even with nofollow) directly affect the outgoing PR distribution, people will tend to allow less comments (maybe usage of iframes even). Is he right? Maybe, Google should develop a new tag as well something like rel=”commented” to inform spiders about it to give less value and wordpress should be installed default with this attribute 🙂
There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.
However, before learning any of that, it's important that you get a lay of the land, so to speak. If you truly want to understand the field of internet marketing, Sharpe has some very good points. In essence there are four overall steps to really understanding internet marketing and leveraging the industry to make money online. Depending on where you are with your education, you'll be somewhere along the lines of these four steps.
After finding websites that have good metrics, you have to make sure the website is related to your site. For each competitor backlink, try to understand how your competitor got that link. If it was a guest article, send a request to become a contributor as well. If it was a product review by a blogger, contact the writer and offer them a good deal in exchange for a similar review. If you don’t want to rebuild an expired domain, just take its backlinks and allow the linkers to be aware of the “to-dead-resource” linking. You can ask a link-builder to replace non-working links with your website’s one. If the content is relevant, you can try to restore it. Be sure that you can make it better than it was before. Reach out and inform the link-builder about the renewed content.
Hemanth Kumar, a good rule of thumb is: if a link on your website is internal (that is, it points back to your website), let it flow PageRank–no need to use nofollow. If a link on your website points to a different website, much of the time it still makes sense for that link to flow PageRank. The time when I would use nofollow are when you can’t or don’t want to vouch for a site, e.g. if a link is added by an outside user that you don’t particularly trust. For example, if an unknown user leaves a link on your guestbook page, that would be a great time to use the nofollow attribute on that link.
In my experience this means (the key words are “not the most effective way”) a page not scored by Google (“e.g. my private link” – password protected, disallowed via robots.txt and/or noindex meta robots) whether using or not using rel=”nofollow” attribute in ‘links to’ is not factored into anything… because it can’t factor in something it isn’t allowed.
The field is replete with terms that might confuse and perplex the average individual. What is a squeeze page? What's a sales funnel? What's a CPA? What's SEO? How do you setup a good blog to filter the right type of relevant traffic and get your offer in front of eligible users? What's a massive value post (MVP) really mean? Clearly, there are an endless array of terms, some of which you might already know or might not depending on how much you presently know about the field.
Non-profit corporations and political entities use Internet marketing to raise awareness about the issues they address and engage individuals in their campaigns. They strongly favor social networking platforms because they are more personal than websites and they are easy to share, increasing the “viral” word-of-mouth effect that is so prevalent in online media.
People think about PageRank in lots of different ways. People have compared PageRank to a “random surfer” model in which PageRank is the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a page. Other people think of the web as an link matrix in which the value at position (i,j) indicates the presence of links from page i to page j. In that case, PageRank corresponds to the principal eigenvector of that normalized link matrix.
DisabledGO, an information provider for people with disabilities in the UK and Ireland, hired Agency51 to implement an SEO migration strategy to move DisabledGO from an old platform to a new one. By applying 301 redirects to old URLS, transferring metadata, setting up Google webmaster tools, and creating a new sitemap, Agency 51 was able to successfully transfer DisabledGO to a new platform while keeping their previous SEO power alive. Additionally, they were able to boost visitor numbers by 21% year over year, and the site restructuring allowed DisabledGO to rank higher than competitors. Their case study is available on SingleGrain.com. Smartphone - In this document, "mobile" or “mobile devices" refers to smartphones, such as devices running Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone. Mobile browsers are similar to desktop browsers in that they can render a broad set of the HTML5 specification, although their screen size is smaller and in almost all cases their default orientation is vertical.
For instance, you might use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to get your message in front of an audience similar to your core demographic. Or, you could pay a social media influencer to share images of your products to her already well-established community. Paid social media can attract new customers to your brand or product, but you’ll want to conduct market research and A/B testing before investing too much in one social media channel.

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. KinderStart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses.[69][70]

Secondly, nofollow is also essential on links to off-topic pages, whether they’re internal or external to your site. You want to prevent search engines from misunderstanding what your pages are about. Linking relevant pages together reinforces your topic relevance. So to keep your topic silos clear, strategic use of the nofollow attribute can be applied when linking off-topic pages together.

SEO experts have a really bad habit: They like to throw around strange words and industry jargon when they talk to customers without checking to make sure that their clients understand the topic at hand. Some do this intentionally to paper over the fact that they use black hat techniques that will ultimately hurt their customers. But for most, it’s simply a matter of failing to recognize that part of their job is to educate their clients.
Online reviews, then, have become another form of internet marketing that small businesses can't afford to ignore. While many small businesses think that they can't do anything about online reviews, that's not true. Just by actively encouraging customers to post reviews about their experience small businesses can weight online reviews positively. Sixty-eight percent of consumers left a local business review when asked. So assuming a business's products or services are not subpar, unfair negative reviews will get buried by reviews by happier customers.
This is what happens to the numbers after 15 iterations…. Look at how the 5 nodes are all stabilizing to the same numbers. If we had started with all pages being 1, by the way, which is what most people tell you to do, this would have taken many more iterations to get to a stable set of numbers (and in fact – in this model – would not have stabilized at all)
Yes the links we have are found elsewhere but our focus is saving our users and clients time so we consolidated the links because it takes hours and hours and hours of searching to find them and some searchers are not very savvy when it comes to looking for, and finding, good quality information. I look at the links like a library, my library has these books, so do a bunch of other libraries. I think it is a shame that I have to hide my books from Google because I have to many really good ones because it is seen as a BAD thing in Google’s eyes. Darned if you dont create a good site, and darned if you do.
Me, I didn’t like the sculpting idea from the start. I linked to what I thought should get links and figured that was pretty natural, to have navigational links, external links and so on — and natural has long been the think Google’s rewarded the most. So I didn’t sculpt, even after Matt helped put it out there, because it just made no long term sense to me.
However, if you're like the hundreds of millions of other individuals that are looking to become the next David Sharpe, there are some steps that you need to take. In my call with this renowned online marketer, I dove deep the a conversation that was submerged in the field of internet marketing, and worked to really understand what it takes to be top earner. We're not just talking about making a few hundred or thousand dollars to squeak by here; we're talking about building an automated cash machine. It's not easy by any means. Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense (google.com/adsense) scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.
Google's strategy works well. By focusing on the links going to and from a Web page, the search engine can organize results in a useful way. While there are a few tricks webmasters can use to improve Google standings, the best way to get a top spot is to consistently provide top quality content, which gives other people the incentive to link back to their pages.
At the time I was strongly advocating page rank sculting by inclusion of no follow links on “related product” links. It’s interesting to note that my proposed technique would have perhaps worked for a little while then would have lost its effectiveness. Eventualy I reached the point where my efforts delivered diminishing returns which was perhaps unavoidable. We have a saying that “good data” is better than “big data.” Bid data is a term being thrown around a lot these days because brands and agencies alike now have the technology to collect more data and intelligence than ever before. But what does that mean for growing a business. Data is worthless without the data scientists analyzing it and creating actionable insights. We help our client partners sift through the data to gleam what matters most and what will aid them in attaining their goals.